Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders


Fred Harrison - 1986
    The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor, with a third grave also being discovered there in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

Girl, Taken - A True Story of Abduction, Captivity, and Survival


Elena Nikitina - 2017
    One woman's shocking true story of abduction, war and survival." - Brian Whitney, author of SUBVERSIVE In the fall of 1994, 21-year-old Elena Nikitina disappeared. Drugged and kidnapped by a group of Chechen gangsters, she was driven through the night to Chechnya. Kept prisoner in a tiny room, she waited while the gang tried to ransom her back to her mother. But a few weeks after the abduction, war broke out between Russia and Chechnya. Life became very cheap, very quickly, and tiny Chechnya became an apocalyptic killing zone. All contact was cut off. There was no electricity. There was no telephone service. There could be no negotiations for Elena’s release. Elena was one lost soul, powerless, and at the mercy of hardened criminals who now fancied themselves patriotic freedom fighters. And she was their enemy – the face of the Russian invader. Through eight horrifying months of captivity, trapped in a land where countless people were dying every day, Elena fought desperately to stay alive, stay sane, and not lose the one thing that kept her going - hope. GIRL, TAKEN is her powerful memoir of that time. It is the harrowing yet stirring tale of a young woman whose courage, determination, and inner strength ultimately delivered her back to her life and her loved ones.

The Shadow of Death: The Hunt for a Serial Killer


Philip E. Ginsburg - 1993
    It is the definitive account of how police and forensic psychologists work to track a killer, and it is the harrowing story of bucolic innocence lost when murder becomes a fact of small-town life. In this brilliant work of true-crime reportage, Philip E. Ginsburg, acclaimed author of the bestselling Poisoned Blood, re-creates for us the terror of the small communities unnerved by inexplicable murders that begin to occur with horrifying regularity. Ginsburg takes us deep into the lives of the women who died, so that we share the pain of their families and friends as the connections among the several deaths become chillingly clear. He introduces us to the most up-to-date methods today's police use to bring a serial killer to justice, making real the close-knit world of the small-town policemen for whom there is no distinction between the personal and professional when their own families are in danger. And, most harrowing of all, Ginsburg paints an indelible portrait of the psychologist who must burrow inside the mind of the unknown serial killer, and who must identify with the murderer even as he works with the police to capture him. Philip E. Ginsburg's new book is imbued with the same unerring sense of dramatic pacing and "bang-up investigative reporting" that made Poisoned Blood "one of the most riveting true-crime stories in memory," according to Publisher's Weekly. The Shadow of Death is superb and mesmerizing true-crime writing.

Slow Death


Jim Fielder - 2001
    Transcripts of audio and videotapes are featured, as well as over 16 pages of shocking photos.

Lindbergh: The Crime


Noel Behn - 1994
    On the night of March 1, 1932, celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. The family paid $50,000 to get “Little Lindy” back, but his remains were discovered in a grove of trees four miles from the Lindbergh house. More than two years after the abduction, Bruno Hauptmann, an unemployed carpenter and illegal German immigrant, was caught with $20,000 of the ransom money. He was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime. But did he really do it?  New York Times–bestselling author Noel Behn spent eight years investigating the case, revisiting old evidence, discovering new information, and shining a bright light on the controversial actions of public figures such as New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, New Jersey State Police Superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Charles Lindbergh himself. The result is a fascinating and convincing new theory of the crime that exonerates Hauptmann and names a killer far closer to the Lindbergh family.   A finalist for the Edgar Award, Lindbergh “not only provides answers to the riddles of the ‘Crime of the Century,’ but hurls us into time past, to a special moment in American history” (Peter Maas, New York Times–bestselling author of Underboss).

Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives


Marilee Strong - 2008
    A surprising number go on to kill a second or even third wife or girlfriend, often in exactly the same way. In more than fifty chilling case studies, Marilee Strong examines the strange and complex psychology that drives these killers—from the murder a century ago that inspired the novel An American Tragedy to Scott Peterson, Mark Hacking, Jeffrey MacDonald, Ira Einhorn, Charles Stuart, Robert Durst, Michael White, Barton Corbin, and many others. Erased also looks at how these men manipulate the legal system and exploit loopholes in missing persons procedures and death investigation, exposing how easy it can be to get away with murder.

The Bayou Strangler: Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer


Fred Rosen - 2009
    In 1997, the bodies of young African American men began turning up in the cane fields of the quiet suburbs of New Orleans. The victims—many of them transient street hustlers—had been brutally raped and strangled, but police had no leads on the killer’s identity. The murders continued, leaving southeast Louisiana’s gay community rattled and authorities desperate for a break in the case. Then, Detectives Dennis Thornton and Dawn Bergeron came together as task force partners, indefatigable in their decade-long effort to track down the killer.   In 2006, DNA evidence finally linked the murders to a suspect: the unassuming Ronald Joseph Dominique, who had lived under the radar for years, working as a pizza deliveryman and meter reader. But who was Ronald Dominique and what led him to commit such heinous crimes?   With direct access to the investigation, Dominique’s confession, and all of the killer’s body dump sites in throughout the state, author Fred Rosen enters the warped mind of a murderer and captures a troubled, disturbing, and broken life. As with the many other serial killers he has covered, including Jeffrey Dahmer (the Milwaukee Cannibal) and Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), Rosen provides a horrifying and fascinating account of the lengths to which a bloodthirsty monster will go to lure and brutalize his victims.

The Prince of Paradise: The True Story of a Hotel Heir, His Seductive Wife, and a Ruthless Murder


John Glatt - 2012
    was born into a hotel empire, Miami's lavish Fontainbleau. But his luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would ironically end in another hotel room—where the police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death.A HISTORY OF VIOLENCESeven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation—when his ex-stripper wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for 24 hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce.A FAMILY MURDER MYSTERYProsecutors believed Narcy let the killers into the room and watched them brutalize Novack. They also suspected she was involved in the death of Novack's mother, who took a fatal fall months before. Strangely, it was Narcy's own daughter who implicated her to the police—in this twisted case of passion, perversion, and paradise lost…"John Glatt is one of the finest true crime craftsmen writing today."—Howard Goldberg,VH1.com

Killing for You: A Brave Soldier, a Beautiful Dancer, and a Shocking Double Murder


Keith Elliot Greenberg - 2017
    A KILLER PLOT Twenty-six-year-old actor Daniel Wozniak was unemployed, facing eviction, and deep in debt for his upcoming wedding. So he devised a diabolical plan: He asked his neighbor Sam Herr, a young war veteran, to help him move some things into the attic of an empty theater. There, Wozniak shot Herr twice in the head before taking his ATM card and cell phone. Hours later,Wozniak performed on stage with his fiancée in a local production of the musical Nine, convinced that he had gotten away with murder… A DRAMATIC LAST ACT Wozniak dismembered his victim’s body and hid the pieces. Then he lured Herr’s college friend Juri “Julie” Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment and shot her twice in the head. The police immediately declared Herr a prime suspect—just as Wozniak had planned. But when Herr was declared missing, and his ATM withdrawals led authorities to Wozniak at his bachelor party, the actor was forced to play the role of a lifetime in a shocking murder investigation that would be his greatest—and final—performance… Includes 8 pages of photos

Convenient Suspect: A Double Murder, a Flawed Investigation, and the Railroading of an Innocent Woman


Tammy Mal - 2017
    Four months later, when their bodies were found in a lonely patch of woods, the police would launch a three-year investigation leading to the arrest of Patricia Lynne Rorrer—a young mother who had never met either victim—as the monster responsible. In Pennsylvania’s first use of mitochondrial DNA in a criminal case, Patricia Rorrer was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. But did the jury make the right decision? Is Patricia Rorrer truly guilty? As new evidence continues to surface, including allegations of evidence tampering, that question requires an answer even more.With a subject matter and storytelling style reminiscent of the hit podcast Serial, Convenient Suspect will keep readers on the edge of their seats. The book reveals information never before made public—information gathered directly from more than 10,000 official documents, including Pennsylvania State Police reports, FBI files, forensic lab results, and the 6,500-page trial transcript. After four years of intensive research, countless interviews with those involved, and hundreds of letters, phone calls, and personal visits with Patricia Rorrer, the truth about the evidence used to convict her can finally be revealed.

Captive: The Story of the Cleveland Abductions


Allan Hall - 2013
    Using interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family, friends, and the police, he shows how these girls remained undetected for ten years in a home just three miles from the block where they all went missing, and the extraordinary moment when they triumphed over their tormentor.

Deliverance Mary Fields, First African American Woman Star Route Mail Carrier in the United States: A Montana History


Miantae Metcalf McConnell - 2016
    Mary Fields, a fifty-three-year old second-generation slave, emancipated and residing in Toledo, receives news of her friend’s impending death. Remedies packed in her satchel, Mary rushes to board the Northern Pacific. Days later, she arrives in the Montana wilderness to find Mother Mary Amadeus lying on frozen earth in a broken-down cabin. Certain that the cloister of frostbit Ursuline nuns and their students, Indian girls rescued from nearby reservations, will not survive without assistance, Mary decides to stay.She builds a hennery, makes repairs to living quarters, cares for stock, and treks into the mountains to provide food. Brushes with death do not deter her. Mary drives a horse and wagon through perilous terrain and sub zero blizzards to improve the lives of missionaries, homesteaders and Indians and, in the process, her own.After weathering wolf attacks, wagon crashes and treacherous conspiracies by scoundrels, local politicians and the state’s first Catholic bishop, Mary Fields creates another daring plan. An avid patriot, she is determined to register for the vote. The price is high. Will she manifest her personal vision of independence?MIANTAE METCALF MCCONNELL’S RESEARCH enabled USPS historians to verify Mary Fields as the first African American woman star route mail carrier in the United States. A fact-based chronicle of Fields’ life in Montana from 1885 until her death in 1914, the narrative examines women rights, bootleg politics, Montana’s turn-of-the-century transition from territory to state and its scandalous woman suffrage election.PRAISE FOR DELIVERANCE MARY FIELDSMIDWEST BOOK REVIEW“Under McConnell's hand, the atmosphere, frontier challenges, and landscapes of Montana come to life. Mary Fields is a true historical figure, dramatized in novel format. Her story will delight readers who look for a blend of accurate historical facts, hard-hitting drama, and realistic scenes powered by a feisty protagonist whose values and concerns become part of the social changes sweeping the nation.”—Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Reviewer & Editor, California BookwatchMcConnell has fashioned a historical narrative marrying prose and poetry, fact with creative writing. With the discerning eye of a photographer, the deft hand of a historian, and the literary heart of a poet, the life of Mary Fields, legendary black woman of Montana, rises off the page into living history. If the reader has any interest in Mary Fields, aka Stagecoach Mary, Deliverance is the one book you must read.—Cowboy Mike Searles, Author, Professor of History, Augusta University, GA.A great story and history of Mary Fields, an important black westerner. A must read for youths and adults. —Bruce A. Glasrud, Author, Specialist Black American West History, Professor, California State University.

Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2016
    What ensued was a media firestorm and a whodunit that transfixed the nation, providing daily debates—and cruel, dinner table entertainment. Now, forty years after Michael Skakel’s conviction, his cousin, acclaimed activist and writer Robert Kennedy, Jr., has taken matters into his own hands to get the charges dropped and clear his cousin’s name.This startling expose—a page-turning, true story of murder, romance, and fame—is the story of Skakel’s conviction that the public has never before been prevue to. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with Skakel and those who knew him, Martha Moxley, and what may have happened the night of the crime, Halloween eve. It also explores why Kennedy believes Skakel has yet to receive a fair trial, and why he demands the original verdict be overturned.This is a heart-wrenching story with a powerful cast of characters. It opens the doors for the public into what was once a “perfect” Greenwich community and how a crime shook an elite family. Kennedy presents the evidence through enlightening text, photographs, and new interviews, and allows readers to decide, given the facts, what they believe really happened to Martha and if, forty years after his crucifixion, Michael Skakel should finally walk free.

Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling


Michael Cannell - 2017
    The race to catch him would give birth to a new science called criminal profiling.Grand Central, Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall―for almost two decades, no place was safe from the man who signed his anonymous letters “FP” and left his lethal devices in phone booths, storage lockers, even tucked into the plush seats of movie theaters. His victims were left cruelly maimed. Tabloids called him “the greatest individual menace New York City ever faced.”In desperation, Police Captain Howard Finney sought the help of a little known psychiatrist, Dr. James Brussel, whose expertise was the criminal mind. Examining crime scene evidence and the strange wording in the bomber’s letters, he compiled a portrait of the suspect down to the cut of his jacket. But how to put a name to the description? Seymour Berkson―a handsome New York socialite, protégé of William Randolph Hearst, and publisher of the tabloid The Journal-American―joined in pursuit of the Mad Bomber. The three men hatched a brilliant scheme to catch him at his own game. Together, they would capture a monster and change the face of American law enforcement.

Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago


William Hazelgrove - 2017
    The story of Chicago fighting the hold that organized crime had on the city to be able to put on The 1933 World's Fair.William Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World's Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open. The story of Rufus and Charles Dawes who gave the fair a theme and then found financing in the worst economic times the country had ever experienced. The story of the most corrupt mayor of Chicago, William Thompson, who owed his election to Al Capone; and the mayor who followed him, Anton Cermak, who was murdered months before the fair opened by an assassin many said was hired by Al Capone.But most of all it’s the story about a city fighting for survival in the darkest of times; and a shining light of hope called A Century of Progress.